The Kinky Truths of Slave Play

Sex play informs Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, a sensation when it opened prior to the pandemic, and now re-opened on Broadway at the August Wilson Theater. The fuss is understandable: The riveting drama opens with three interracial couples enacting slave-master fantasies in period dress. What follows is contemporary group therapy as each couple is  scrutinized, and evaluated by a team of analysts. In Harris’ drama, fitting in our moment of reckoning, text and subtext all come down to Race. As the slave-master scenario is so archetypical, you wonder, shouldn’t all sex deserve this clinical touch? “A Note on Your Discomfort” by writer Norman Parker in the Playbill is explicit: “Slave Play is a study in American memory: the psychologies of the prized and of the oppressed; the grateful and the entitled: who’s top, who’s bottom; who speaks, who can’t, and who betta listen.”

 Not since Leroi Jones’ Dutchman, a pivotal midcentury work --as the poet, in response to his shifting politics, took on the name and identity Amiri Baraka, --has race/ sex been so examined, so in your face. Using language that was sure to offend everyone, Jones set up this conceit: an apple-wielding blond sidles up to a polite and preppie Black man on a subway, and in front of a carful of passengers eviscerates him. Harris has said he was much influenced by Baraka, but in Slave Play, the mythic transcendence is replaced by the tropes of our troubled ethos: even in times of brutal, violent life-threatening predicaments, victims want only to be heard.

A friend opined that Slave Play is merely pornographic, defined as sex displayed gratuitously. It would be hard to argue otherwise, with Slave Play’s final moments enacted on a bed fully mirrored for the audience’s delectation. Kaneisha (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy) and a naked Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan) on top. Maybe the question depends on how his tight ass grabs you.